ABSTRACT
In Listowel, Ontario, the small Canadian farm town where I grew up, one corner of the main intersection was occupied by Livingstone’s Drugstore, run by Dr. Livingstone. Dr. Livingstone was a real doctor turned druggist, but for children his store was above all the place where you could buy practical jokes, or have them played on you by Dr. Livingstone, especially if you went in on an afternoon when Mrs. Livingstone wasn’t there. It was through Dr. Livingstone, for example, that I was introduced to the miracles of the dribble glass, the squirt ring, the Chinese handcuff, the phony pack of Juicy Fruit Gum that snapped down on your finger, and, around 1955, a horrifying new item Dr. Livingstone secretly sold my older brother and his friend: plastic vomit. I was therefore unsure if he really meant it the day he produced a discolored sheet of faded writing in a frame and said it was a letter written by a great uncle of his who had been a famous missionary in Africa. Only after consulting at Sunday school with Miss Roxie Ellis, herself a former missionary, did I take the story for true. “Our” Dr. Livingstone was a grand nephew of the “real” Dr. Livingstone in Africa. English Canada was still colonial in the 1950s: reality and history were somewhere else, embodied in British men.
